> According to the MPD's third organized crime control division, the names, dates of birth, and sex of 38 men
Looks like they leaked their sex a second time.
Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
171–180 of 222 posts
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#172BusinessInsider, October 2021, "The Japanese government is still trying to phase out floppy disks a decade after Sony stopped making them" https://www.businessinsider.com/japan-government-tokyo-flopp...
Around 1992 or so I was working at a large manufacturer that was still working to eliminate punch cards. Don't underestimate how long a technology can stay in use in organizations where technology is not the main business line.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The disks "almost never broke and lost data," Yoichi Ono, who is in charge of managing public funds for Meguro ward, told the Nikkei. This was not my experience.
Nor mine. I distinctly remember back to college circa 2000, copying a project from my computer in the dorms, walking to a project partner's dorm room adjacent to mine, and in that 15 second walk, having the data corrupted. Thumb drives weren't common or cheap, yet, though I did have a Zip Drive, as did nearly all of the school's lab computers. I never had a corruption problem with Zip disks, but man, floppies? Seemed…
I had a lot of issues with corrupted ZIP disks back in those days. They were far more reliable than floppies but far less reliable than hard drives. It got so bad I gave up using them for long term backups and switched to tape for that, relegating ZIP to quick (for the time) transfers between computers and always checking file integrity after every move.
USB flash drives were a massive leap forward in sneakernet data shifting.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Won't help if the finder of the floppies has a Mac. I have a bunch of old floppy disks, but from what I've read online, you can't even hook a USB floppy drive to a Mac anymore. All that code is gone from the OS.
You can install VirtualBox and pass the USB floppy device through to any OS that can read it.
IIRC, really old Macs got extra storage out of a floppy by spinning the disc faster when the read/write heads were on the outer tracks. Made them a wee bit difficult to read on any other hardware.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#175Criminals recover the disks but then are foiled in their dastardly endeavors because they can’t find a disk drive to load the floppies.
There's many options to buy affordable 3.5" USB floppy drives on Amazon and eBay. However, I haven't been able to find any obvious options to read 5.25" floppy disks on a modern machine.
There were external 5.25 drives back in the day that connected via parallel port, one of those paired with a parallel to USB bridge should do the trick. The really hard part will be drivers, unless your USB adapter has one baked into the firmware you may find yourself writing your own drivers.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Japan isn't backwards. It's more accurate to describe them as "sideways". They just don't follow the same tech track as everyone else.
Do you have any citations for this? I'd love to explore in depth what the lateral tech track looks like.
They have flying cars. See the documentary Red Sun (1993) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(film)). :-)
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Japan isn't backwards. It's more accurate to describe them as "sideways". They just don't follow the same tech track as everyone else.
Do you have any citations for this? I'd love to explore in depth what the lateral tech track looks like.
My husband is Japanese so all my information is second-hand, but if you want to learn about Japan in a non-anime-manga-etc based way, I can recommend the TV channel "NHK World", which is in English, and also English-language Japanese news sources like the Japan Times.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#178I wonder how long ago did they stop using punch cards?
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Japan has also been known to cram passengers into trains during rush hour. I imagine this practice has probably been fervently deprecated due to covid19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ
That seems like a personal decision to get into the already crowded car instead of waiting for the next one, I don't imagine someone is standing at the station platform and forcing more people into the train car against their will.
Yes, people willingly got on the train and the platform stewards helped.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#180In mid-late 90s, when floppy disks were not dead yet, I used to help my father to extract lots of files from their devices to floppy disks. They were using floppy disks only because an application that they were using to extract and convert data from their devices was designed to only copy files in chunks to floppy disks.
One day, out of curiosity, I opened every single file of the application that they were using to convert and extract data to see if I could make sense of anything. I accidentally found out that there was a config file that had a destination path for copying converted files. It was hard coded to drive A (floppy drive).
I changed the path, tested the application, and it worked. I shared the trick with my father and he shared it with his organization. He became the employee of the year for that discovery.
Floppy disks were expensive on the scale that they were using them, and they often had to deal with a lot of data loss accidents. Their IT team even had a data recovery team specialized to recover data from broken floppy disks because usually it meant they had to send a team back to redo the work. The storage on the devices they were using was very limited, so often during their week-long operations, they had to extract data before they could continue their work, only to realize later that some chunks were missing from the first part, and then they had to redo that part of operation again.